


looking like a morning star

by queerofcups



Series: skin and flowers, honey dipper [1]
Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Coming Out, Established Relationship, Gender Identity, Internalized Homophobia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-08
Updated: 2017-01-08
Packaged: 2018-09-15 17:00:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9247085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queerofcups/pseuds/queerofcups
Summary: Phil is perceptive. Dan has nail polish, a choker and no timeline. It's all fine though.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Basically just a lovenote to our favorite marble princess. Femme recognize femme, Dannyboy. 
> 
> Title is from Sylvan Esso's Dress.  
> If you're Dan or Phil, dear god, stop reading immediately.  
> Unbeta'd, I love every single necessary comma.

Looking like a Morning Star

Phil doesn’t notice until they’re watching the first rough cut of the TATINOF documentary. They’ve seen all the footage before, and lived it before that, but this is the first time they’re seeing it all cut together. It’s a rough idea of what the final product will look like, but Phil’s heart still stirs a little. It would probably feel even bigger if they weren’t still sort of in the middle-y end of a sort-of world tour. America was done— finished in a spray of gold and confetti and _relief_.

So now they’re stuffed into an airplane (again), Phil is feeling a little sniffly (again) and they’re watching a rough cut of their documentary (which, even after a book and a touring stageshow, is still a little absurd) on the way to a short break in Japan.

So, even though they’ve seen bits and pieces of _The Story of TATINOF_ this is the first time Phil notices it. It’s the wifi segment, a collage of him and Dan asking (only a little frantic) for the wifi code in dressing rooms across America. It’s from a show date in the middle of the tour, in the tiniest and creepiest of the dressing rooms they had in America. The people working there must have felt a little bad and given them a personalized wifi code as recompense.

It’s the quickest moment, Dan’s swaning about, loud as he usually is on camera. The lady off screen reminds him they need the password. Dan on the screen turns back to her and Phil looks over to Dan in the seat next to him.

The thing is, Phil has known Dan for a long time. The decade mark is barreling towards them and he’s spent most of it right here, next to Dan, learning and relearning him as he grows into adulthood and they both grow into each other.

He was there when Dan started getting questions about being gay and laughing them off. He was there, appreciating the lilt of Dan’s voice and the drama of his still growing limbs.

And he was there in 2012, when the questions were still coming, when Dan started growing aware of the swing of his limbs, the tilt and sway of his hands. Phil was there when he started questioning them, started pulling in— straightening his spine, cutting off his movements. He stopped touching Phil on camera, started making more jokes about girls around the same time.

Phil knows plenty of gay and bi men, (‘You can just say queer’, his inner Dan drawls at him. He could, he hears Dan mumbling gleefully at tumblr about queer shit all the time. The word just doesn’t come to him like it does Dan) and been friends with more than a few of them. He and Tyler aren’t besties, but they like each other and Tyler likes to sit beside them in quiet when the parties and people of Playlist get to be too much. So Phil knows flamboyance. He knows feminine men. He knows that Dan isn’t particularly flamboyant but he _is_ soft and dramatic and uninterested in traditional masculinity. People pick up on it and make assumptions.

(Phil also follows Dan on the anonymous aesthetic tumblr that’s just for Dan and unknowing followers. He knows that Dan has three separate tags including the word femme. Phil had briefly considered getting him one of those neon femme signs—Dan’s reblogged a few different ones—but decided against it as it’d be a pain to hide during a liveshow or day in the life.)

Dan knows it, too.

He knows it the first time he slips the Kanye sweater over his head, his collarbones emerging and the sleeves slipping past his wrists, the whole thing fitting like when girls wear their boyfriend’s shirts. He knows it when he slips into his sassy voice in public, the one Tyler had “yaaaas bitch”’d at him for once and he’d lit up like a goddamn Christmas tree.

Dan reaches over to tap the laptop’s spacebar, pausing the video and meets Phil’s eyes and shrugs. “It’s fine. No one will notice.”

The plane shakes a little with turbulence and Phil turns back to the screen. There’s a baby crying a few rows back and Dan is breathing beside him. Phil suspects that this is a _thing_ , but a thing he needs to quietly let grow. He shrugs and lets it go.

\---

Phil doesn’t think about it again until after Australia.

The thing about meet and greets is there’s so much going on. It’s a lot, even for Phil, who’s a people person. It’s even more for Dan who isn’t really. So Phil has to balance meeting and greeting people, (so many awesome, lovely people, how is this his life?) and glancing at Dan to make sure he doesn’t need a second’s reprieve from wearing his show face and giving his show hugs. It’s a lot. So, no, he doesn’t notice Dan’s nails until he’s scrolling through his @s after the show is over and they’re back at the hotel.

He doesn’t even know when Dan had time to paint his nails, they’d been together basically the entire day.

“Dan!” he calls to the open bathroom door.

“Yeah?” Dan says, coming to lean against the door frame. He’s obviously freshly showered; his chest is still pink, and wearing Phil’s cookie monster pajama pants.

“Did you paint your nails for the show?” Phil asks, turning his phone as if Dan can see his @s from the other side of their beds.

“Well,” Dan says throwing the towel into the bathroom. It’s probably still somehow neater than the towels Phil had used for his shower. “No. Not for the show. Obviously.”

He wiggles his fingers at Phil. They’re the regular pink of his bare skin. Phil holds an arm over, gestures for Dan to come closer.

“Are we talking about this?” he asks as Dan crawls onto the bed, crowding him against the wall, taking up too much space. Dan will move over to the other bed eventually, hoarding all his precious space, but right now he’s basically in Phil’s lap, damp curls brushing against Phil’s face.

“Nothing to talk about. The fans gave us a couple bottles in America. I kept a few. Felt inspired. #rebranding.” Dan settles down, swipes his own phone from the nightstand and settling down, still tucked into Phil’s side.

Phil rolls his eyes but still shifts so his back is against the wall, legs crossed over Dan’s. “Right. But you’ve always- you care a lot about this stuff. Gender stuff and the way people perceive you and keeping us private.”

Dan shrugs. “Sure. But the gender ambiguity or whatever,” he waves a hand, “that’s my thing. Is he straight? Is he gay? Ohhh, if only there were another option. Or we stopped acting like a guy being a bit swishy automatically means that he likes dick. You know, Phil, it’s really fucked up that—”

“Yes, Dan,” Phil says over Dan, cutting off a rant about gender identity and sexuality being two different, if connected, things. He’s fairly sure he could recite this particular rant in his sleep, he’s heard Dan deliver it to so many of their friends. Usually while at least tipsy. “But you _do_ like dick, among other things, something we’ve been actively keeping from people for, oh, five years now? By, among other things, you being as, I don’t know, not femme as you can stand to be?”

Dan shrugs, “I’m not saying we’re coming out yet.”

Something in Phil spikes and shivers. The yet is new, the yet is very new, and he doesn’t know what to do with the warmth that spreads in his own chest. He hadn’t realized he’d been hoping. They hadn’t had this conversation in a few years and he’d thought he was fine with it. But this warmth in his chest and the butterflies in his stomach are telling different story.

“Yet?” He asks softly.

“Yet,” Dan says again and shrugs. He’s blushing, all the way down to his bare chest and Phil leans over because he has to kiss this boy, his boy, right now.

“Oh,” Dan says quietly against his mouth. Phil pulls away, just long enough to get his knees bracketing Dan’s and settle into his lap, tilting his forehead against Dan’s.

“Yet,” Phil says, his lips brushing against Dan’s. Dan tilts his head up to kiss him properly and it’s the end of that conversation for now.

\---

By the time they get to the tour dates in Stockholm, its not exactly a finished conversation, but Phil’s really too tired to bring it back up. They’ve been home just long enough to miss it even more when they go back out. It feels like one, or both, of them is sick or grumpy or both all the time and there hasn’t been time for Phil to be clued in on the timeline of Dan’s femmesplosion.

It’s not even like that part of Dan is that obvious, Phil thinks, staring at the back of the driver’s headrest as they zoom through Stockholm to their hotel. He doesn’t have that particular sort of voice Phil’s queer dude friend’s have. (Phil’s brain has to skitter away from thinking Dan doesn’t _sound_ gay. He could just imagine the double lecture he’d get for a. mislabeling Dan’s bisexuality and b. something something internalized homophobia something something nothing wrong with “sounding” gay whatever that means, Phillip Lester) Dan’s just. Dan. Sometimes he calls himself princess. Sometimes he wears big sweaters that show off his collarbones and he leans into the camera just a little, so the light hits them. He’d painted his nails during their time at home, but took it off for the liveshow. Phil caught him looking in the bathroom mirror one day, hair pushed into a quiff, pouting at himself.

“What,” Phil had asked flatly.

“Smizing,” Dan answered, tilting a shoulder forward and smoldering at Phil. “Someone posted a clip from America’s Next Top Model on twitter? Thought I’d give it a try. What about this hairstyle?”

So, no, Dan’s way of doing femme wasn’t really that obvious and Phil didn’t know why he was so obsessed with Dan letting their viewers see these little flashes.

 

Of course, during the first Stockholm m&g, when they get handed the chokers, Phil’s first thought is that he remembers the first time these were in style. His second thought is that whatever Dan’s timeline is, it probably just got accelerated a bit.

He glances over at Dan as they get in position for the picture. Dan looks perfectly normal, smiling and turning toward the camera. He also looks horribly attractive, the little pink pendant resting against his throat, the choker adding some dangerous and, yeah, _femme_ to his whole look. For the time it takes to take the picture, he goes from awkwardly tall dude taking pictures to- to- a femme fatale who takes you on their motorcycle and makes out with you in public and probably has tattoos or something.

Phil realizes he’s sort of zoned out through the rest of the picture taking when Dan nudges him and glances down at the choker Phil’s wearing. Phil jumps to attention, puling it over his head and quietly slipping the choker in his pocket. He’s not sure what Dan’s done with his, his neck is bare now, but Phil wants to be sure at least once makes it back to the apartment with them. It’s possible Phil needs a timeline, if only to know when to prepare himself for Dan tapping into the power of being blazingly, disarmingly hot.

“You ok, mate?” Dan asks quietly, between pictures, when there’s the tiniest lull.

“More than,” Phil says back, flashing him a smile. He definitely needs that timeline.

\--

“There’s no timeline, Phil,” Dan says, dropping out of Catty’s valley girl accent for a minute into his own. “I’m just feeling it out.” Phil shrugs, letting his other questions go to lean over the chair’s arm to press a kiss Dan’s cheek.

\--

“There’s no timeline, Phil,” Dan says a week later, showing him the pink jumper he’d gotten from Topman for Gamingmas. His coloring on camera would probably benefit from a deeper pink, but Phil doesn’t say anything, suspecting that this is an important moment, even if Dan insists it isn’t.

\--

“There’s no timeline, Phil!” Dan says after he reblogs one of the neon _femme_ gifs on his danisnotonfire tumblr, probably sending the fandom into their first tizzy of the new year. The gifs flashes in the darkness of their lounge, turning Dan green, then blue. He’s wearing his trouble maker grin. Phil rolls his eyes and turns back to his own dashboard, fond smile tugging at his mouth.

\--

“There’s no timeline on the femme stuff,” Dan says, sitting on the bed next to Phil, bowl of cereal in hand, putting his feet up on Phil’s half packed suitcase. They leave for Japan in a week and Phil is determined to have them both packed and ready to go at least a few days beforehand.  “We should probably talk about the coming out stuff, though.” Phil ignores the fizzing in his stomach, he’s used to it by now.

 “Ugh,” Dan says, turning to look at Phil. “I hate that. Why can’t they just like, know?”

“Don’t they?” Phil asks, opening up iCal, looking at his video schedule. They should probably stay away from Valentine’s Day. That’d be a little too on the nose.

“Mm,” Dan says, “Should I get some Sailor Moon merch this time? That’d be a fun Instagram post. #femmegoals.”

“Please stop speaking in hashtags,” Phil asks, grabbing at Dan’s spoon. ”None of the skirts. You’d get flagged for indecency.”

Phil manages to steal two spoonfuls of cereal while Dan laughs.

\---

“Right!” Dan says brightly to the camera, picking up one of the anatomically correct heart-shaped pillows they’d gotten to decorate for this video, “To celebrate this capitalist plot to sell you candy and a heteronormative ideal of what “love” is—“

“Dan!” Phil says, not bothering to try to keep the fondness off his face. He turns to grin at the camera. “Valentine’s Day is a happy time. So, we’ve got this box of Valentine’s Day peeps I got Dan—“

“Almost ten years we’ve been together, and he can’t get me chocolates,” Dan jokes, eyes glittering, fiddling with the pink pendant of a familiar choker.

“We’re gonna play chubby bunny! Hopefully no one will die. It’ll probably be me if someone does. We know how big Dan’s mouth is.”

Phil doesn’t even take out Dan’s lascivious wink later in editing. He’ll leave it for the gif makers.

 


End file.
